Rosemarie Beck (Rosemarie Beck Foundation)
Rosemarie Beck (1923 - 2003) emerged in the mid-50s as a figurative painter; she was a beloved teacher and mentor, and a gifted artist.
MessageCollection: Apollo and Daphne (1981-1984)
On August 15, 1983, Beck wrote in her journal about her current area of interest for her paintings: "Ovidian narratives". This was a reference to her growing preoccupation with the Metamorphoses, a collection of ancient Greek narratives written down by the Roman poet Ovid in the first century AD.
Beck had already devoted almost five years in the early 1970s to one of Ovid's most famous narratives, the tragic tale of Orpheus. But in 1983 she was particularly focused on the story of Apollo and Daphne, in which a river nymph evades the unwanted sexual advances of the god Apollo, by transforming into a laurel tree. It is the ultimate case of a woman who is forced to take extreme action in order to preserve her autonomy in the face of unrelenting male pressure. Today, we would probably call it a #MeToo story.
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